I’ve seen too much of this. No, the nazis and the Soviets were not equivalent.
Do. Better.
Ah, the “double genocide” theorists. What a delightful bunch of historical revisionists. It’s like they took a drunken joyride through the annals of history and crashed straight into the “Bad Takes” tree. Comparing the Soviet Union to the Nazis? Might as well compare a stubbed toe to a decapitation.
And you can bet your ass that most of these armchair historians haven’t even read a book on the topic. It’s all surface-level, cherry-picked facts with more holes than a block of Swiss cheese. It’s historical interpretation with the depth of a kiddie pool. Dive in, and you’re gonna crack your head open.
Honestly, it’s a disservice to the real complexities of history. But nuance, for these folks, seems to be a concept as elusive as a unicorn riding a Bigfoot. The actual victims, the real-life people affected by these events, deserve better than to be pawns in someone’s misguided, edgy take on history.
So, to those pushing the “double genocide” theory: Maybe spend less time trying to stir the pot with wild equivalences and more time, I dunno, actually understanding the depth and breadth of historical events. And for the love of God, please get some new reading glasses, because your perspective is blurrier than a foggy window smeared with bullshit.
Just so long as the depth and breadth doesn’t obscure the basic facts:
- The Nazi government consciously decided to exterminate about 12 million people, in an attempt at
ethnic cleansinggenocide based on race - The Soviet Union’s government consciously decided to exterminate about 1.6 million people, in an attempt at political cleansing
- The Soviet Union also, through gross ineptitude, starved an additional 3.5 - 5.0 million people
Do you agree that these things happened?
It’s technically not holocaust denial, they got their ethnic cleansing death toll pretty reasonable. Double genocide works by dragging down the Holocaust and dragging up the USSR’s deaths, they’re only doing the latter. Obviously none of us agree with their take on the USSR’s situatuon but I wanna give them a minute to say their piece so we can talk about it
Even if we accepted those numbers at face value, which we obviously shouldn’t, you’re still admitting the Nazis were far worse even by your own made up standards.
who’s the 1.6 million? And does the 3.5 - 5.0 million figure account for naturally occurring drought, needless deaths brought on by embargo, and farm owners intentionally and preemptively destroying their grain and slaughtering their livestock (cited by Wikipedia, see [17]) to prevent peasants from getting any of it?
I’d love to engage in good faith with you on this, what are your thoughts?
To be clear, I do believe that central mismanagement played a role in the death toll, but I also believe (and precedent suggests) that a capitalist state in charge of the same situation would see far, far more deaths and suffering
We have droughts in other places without it leading to famines.
It’s like the question of why New Orleans got flooded in 2005. Did New Orleans get flooded because there was a category 5 hurricane, or because government corruption led to being poorly prepared for the category 5 hurricane?
The way I personally see it is that government ineptitude led to New Orleans being flooded by a predictable event.
In the same way I think the disenfranchisement of the kulaks in Ukraine led to the famine. And it’s not some fringe theory. Many respectable bodies consider the Holodomor to be a genocide.
And the basic fact stands that many countries have experienced a drought without it resulting in mass starvation.
Another analogy would be a person driving without their seatbelt on. You could say that it was the head-on collision with the tree that killed the driver, or you could say it was the decision not to wear a seatbelt that killed the driver.
I think the Soviet government destroyed any chance of a skilled response to that drought, by killing or imprisoning all the skilled farmers in that region, because they chose to equate financial success with unfair exploitation rather than skill. They ignored the fact that success can be evidence of competence, and in doing so doomed the society to famine by punishing all the successful people.
Alright, comrades, put on your thinking caps, because we’re diving into the cesspool of historical oversimplification, and it smells like capitalist pig slop! Let’s break down this capitalist propaganda down piece by piece:
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Nazi Extermination: No bones about it – the Nazis were grade-A shitheads. Their systematic and conscious decision to wipe out around 12 million people in the name of ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity. Period. It’s the darkest level in the game of human history, and they played it with sadistic glee.
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Soviet Extermination for Political Reasons: 1.6 million? That’s a hefty (and grossly inaccurate) number, comrade, but let’s add a little context, shall we? No one’s saying the Soviet regime was always all rainbows and kittens. But you’ve got to understand the political climate and the paranoia of the times. I ain’t condoning it, but I sure as hell am not going to let you oversimplify it into a neat little bullet point for your anti-communist agenda. Many of those deaths were during the Civil War and the turbulent times that followed.
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Starvation Numbers: Ah, the classic “Stalin starved millions” narrative. While there’s truth to the great famine, pinning it all on “gross ineptitude” is like blaming a game’s poor graphics entirely on one pixel. Factors like weather conditions, and yes, mismanagement, played a role. But to toss out numbers like 3.5 - 5.0 million as if it’s just another score on a leaderboard? Classy.
Alright, now let’s delve into the issue of “intentionality” even deeper. While you’re busy playing the “Evil Olympics”, let’s not forget some important nuances:
The big ol’ narrative floating around is that both the Nazis and the Soviets had these grand plans to exterminate people like it’s some fucked up DLC they both decided to download. But here’s where you’re more twisted than a pretzel in a tornado: while the Nazis clearly and explicitly had extermination policies (hello, Final Solution), the Soviets were a different beast. The Soviet government never launched a campaign with the explicit aim of exterminating entire ethnic or political groups. Sure, there were purges, relocations, and episodes of repression. The likes of the Holodomor, where millions died due to a famine in Ukraine in the early 1930s, is a tragic event in Soviet history. But labeling it as a deliberate attempt at extermination? That’s like trying to speedrun a game without knowing the controls.
Now, did the Soviet regime have policies that inadvertently or through neglect may have led to death? Yes. Did they, like the Nazis, have a master plan for the systematic extermination of entire groups? No. The two are not the same, no matter how much some armchair historians want to mash them together. See, history ain’t a black and white pixel art game. It’s a complex, 4K, multi-layered RPG. And trying to simplify it with broad brushstrokes does a disservice to everyone who lived, suffered, and died during those times. So, next time you want to drop “facts”, make sure you’ve got the full game manual, not just the cheat codes.
The Black Book of Communism is ASS.
What were they thinking?
Okay imagine your a little kid and you pick this book up at the library on Friday. You’re like, “Communism! Right on!” and its the Black Book so ot should be rad, like the Black Album, but its not, its just fascist propaganda. And there goes your whole weekend! What a shitload of fuck.
lmao hey look it’s that 1.6 million number that includes German POW deaths
I see someone stumbled across Applebaum
That was from Wikipedia. If you disagree with the number you can go there and change it.
How are these comparable?
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Mass genocide
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A civil war
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Famine in a region prone to regular famines for centuries (the last famine the region ever had I might add)
If we’re comparing large numbers of deaths here we should throw the British Empire’s record and the US Empire’s record alongside them. The British Empire probably has both beat with the India famine alone, the US genocide of native americans is estimated at over 100million. We’re accepting those as products of their time though? Why? Why are we comparing only the soviets to the nazis and not them?
Nobody is going to disagree that those happened here. But the framing you’re doing is fucked.
(Just a clarification comrade - and I could be wrong, I’m doing this from memory - but I think the 100 million number is genocide across all of the western hemisphere from 1492. The figure I’ve seen for just what was contained the present USA is around 10 million. Doesn’t make it any less evil of course, death to America, but just wanted to clarify that for posterity)
Your statistics, using the very same standards you used to cook the books to make them happen, would easily qualify the million-plus that were killed by covid in the United States alone as a conscious decision to exterminate those who died from it.
You are not nearly as clever as you think you are, bootlicker.
ethnic cleansing
Ethnic cleansing is the explosion of an ethnic group from a geographical area. The Nazis did not attempt to ethnically cleanse Europe of Jewish, Romani, Slavic, etc people.
Genocide is the act of destroying an ethnic group via destruction of individuals of that group. The Nazis did attempt to commit genocide against Jewish, Romani, Slavic, etc people.
Don’t even get me started on that capitalist propaganda piece known as The Gulag Archipelago…
So, Solzhenitsyn decides to pen this mammoth of a book, which is basically a relentless bitch-fest about the Soviet prison system. Look, buddy, I get it – gulags ain’t no five-star resorts. But what’s with the endless whining? It’s like listening to someone complain about a bad Tetris game when the blocks just won’t fit right. Only this time, the blocks are tales of sorrow and despair, and, boy, does Solzhenitsyn lay it on thick!
This dude’s blending memoir, history, and his personal gripes into a cocktail of anti-communist drivel. It’s like trying to make vodka out of moldy potatoes and rainwater. Sure, it might get you drunk, but you’ll wish you never took a sip!
Oh, and the size of this thing! It’s like Solzhenitsyn’s trying to outdo Tolstoy in the “lengthy Russian novels that no one actually finishes” competition. It’s the literary equivalent of a speedrunner trying to complete a glitchy game with no save points.
And, let’s talk ideology. This guy’s so hell-bent on painting communism as the devil’s own ideology that he basically ignores any nuanced discussion. It’s like playing a game where the only strategy is to spam the attack button and hope for the best. Bro, maybe take a step back and see the bigger picture. Not everything’s black and white, you know?
So, while “The Gulag Archipelago” might serve as a wet dream for anti-communist folks, it’s like a broken cartridge to me – full of glitches, bias, and a one-sided perspective. If you’re looking for a balanced take on history, maybe look elsewhere. If you’re just here for the dramatic horror stories and want to bash communism, then, by all means, dive into this ocean of capitalist tears. But don’t say I didn’t warn ya.
The way I’ve heard that book described is not fact, but urban legends, or fairy tales, from the gulags that people have related. Like, it isn’t accurate factually, but it encompasses the feelings of a few people (including the author) had about being there.
My hottest take: The Gulag Archipelago (which I read in its entirety back in my lib days) is pretty good as a piece of fiction
I’d also say most of his numbers are utterly wrong and overstated, because he used the stats of the atypical political prisoner gulags he was in (which weren’teven typical for the average poltitical prisoner.)
We know this because after the USSR fell we got access to the real stats.
I’m a bit confused, would a revisionist history be non-materialistic in nature?
Libs absorb nazi propaganda like a sponge.
almost like they have absorbed the culture of the country they live in. a certain type of country.
Source on Jewish scholars views on this? I’m collecting sources to debunk debunked talking points like this theory.
David Katz is one of the best, and most accessible, especially on how the Baltic states have deliberately curated and used it to whitewash their own Nazi pasts and current far-right - mostly because he spent about 25 years living and researching it there (he now lives and teaches in Lithuania).
This a the useful overview article that I posted the other day.
He also collaborated with a number of other academics and historians to create the DefendingHistory website. Here’s their archive on double genocide related stuff. There’s some background links at the top, then papers by different authors, then related news articles etc.
its a bad idea to say it in the same breath, because imo comparing the holocaust to something not the holocaust is a form of trivialization, the holocaust was really really bad. even other purely evil genocides were not as mechanized and widespread as the holocaust.
also, you know, everything in our era is not going to be ideal. states exist for a reason, and states can be problematic. but as socialists we have to go for whatever is capable of moving society forward, and states can do that under strict guidance.
Criticising the USSR is ok, but trying to equivicate them to the nazis, explicitly or implicitly, is not. For example, saying “The Nazis and soviets were both abhorrent, just for different reasons”, is entering Holocaust trivialisation territory, because it reads as implying they were comparable.
- What exactly did the Soviets do that was “abhorrent”?
- The USSR was not an empire; to the best of my knowledge, the only territories it captured were those occupied by Nazis.
Which ones? The Baltic states? Finland? The ungoverned part of Poland that would’ve been taken by Nazis otherwise?
I think it got removed because of the context it was posted in. Like asking this question when the topic is the double genocide theory just reads like equivocating between the Nazis and the USSR. Good faith criticism of the USSR is allowed here. But in the context of this thread? Bad look.
lmao are you referencing the Russian Civil War, are you talking about the Central Asian Soviets?
Wow you really need to do some basic research, the strongest pushers for unionization of the soviets equals “occupied” and “invaded” in your head? Do you even know what the White Army was?
Even that old neocon slug Christopher Hitchens celebrated the victory of the Red Army over those murderous fascist cannibals
There’s a reason even anti-communtist academics don’t like to harp on the civil war period too much, hard to make false equivalences bewteen popular liberatory peasant armies and open and proud foreign backed genociders
The only thing Stalin did wrong was not go past Berlin
